Why is the sky blue? The sky is blue, there is no doubt about it. But why is the color of the sky blue and why isn’t the sky any other color? In this article, we tried to explain why the sky is blue. Here are the details…
In the continuation of this article, we tried to explain to you how you understand the blue color of the sky. Come on, let’s see…
Why is the sky blue?
Sunlight is white but contains many different colors. We can see these different colors when we pass white light through a prism or when a rainbow is formed. White light from the Sun is scattered by colliding with many particles as it travels through the Earth’s atmosphere.
Sunlight is white but contains many different colors. We can see these different colors when we pass white light through a prism or when a rainbow is formed. White light from the Sun is scattered by colliding with many particles as it travels through the Earth’s atmosphere. The amount of scattering varies depending on the wavelength of light. The shorter the wavelength, the greater the scattering. For example, short wavelength blue light is scattered at a greater rate than long wavelength red light. The term Rayleigh Scattering is used to express the scattering of light by particles smaller than its wavelength. The amount of this scattering is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the wavelength of light, that is, the shorter the wavelength, the greater the amount of scattered light.
The blue appearance of the sky is the result of the scattering of different colors (wavelengths) of light from the Sun at different rates. When the sun rises in the sky, the short wavelength blue light from the Sun is scattered much more than the longer wavelength colors, scattering in all directions and this causes the sky to appear blue. A different situation occurs when the sun is very close to the horizon, such as sunrise and sunset. When the sun is close to the horizon, the sun’s rays travel much further through the atmosphere. Along this path, blue light with short wavelengths undergoes a lot of absorption and scattering, and as a result, more reds with longer wavelengths reach our eyes than other colors.
When we look at the rainbow, we see a wide range of colors, from red to green, blue and ultimately purple. Violet light has the shortest wavelength and the amount of scattering is much higher than other colors. Therefore, the sky can normally be expected to appear purple. One of the main reasons why the sky looks blue instead of purple is that the light receptors in our eyes are more sensitive to blue than other colors.
